Tyla and I are ensconced in the “did we say there was wifi? tee hee!” comforts of Via1, chugging our way towards Montreal. She’s asleep, and adorable; I’m pecking away at my infernal Blackberry, and unexplainably impatient — must be a day that ends in “y”.

Tyla hasn’t been back to Montreal since we moved back to Toronto in 2002, and I’ve only been there a handful of times for business. It’s a downright travesty, given how much fun the city is, and it’s one that we’re going to do our best to put right over the next few days.

There is an amazing amount of great stuff happening in my part of the Mozilla world these days, and I have been desperately derelict in my duties as regard publicizing them. I must atone for this, but not now. Now I settle back, enjoy the last 200 pages of a righteous, 6-volume sci-fi epic that vlad started me on back in Serbia, and plot my path of culinary marauding through the unsuspecting establishments of Montreal.
[tags]travel, mozilla, montreal, tyla[/tags]

Seven years ago today, friends and family traveled from far and wide to help me celebrate tricking a beautiful and brilliant woman into agreeing to spend her life with me. There were photographs taken, but I’m not going to help you find them, because I look pretty awful in them, and this is my site, so there.

I had been asking her for some time before she assented, truth be told, but once I’d helped release the original source for Mozilla, and let that sink in for half a year, she just couldn’t hold out. A man who can arrange for more than 100 mirrors in dozens of countries, on 48 hours’ notice, can’t be that bad a catch, right?

The other day, Tyla’s computer — a 2000-era Dell Latitude originally used for my Mozilla consulting — finally progressed from “intermittent reboot” to “drive can’t read operating system, sorry”. It had been some time coming, but we hadn’t really settled on what the replacement would be.

I am a happy Mac user these days, at least to the extent that I can be happy with anything related to computers. When I pitched the glories of the Mac to Tyla a while back, she was somewhat skeptical. She much prefers the eraser-point mouse to a touchpad, thinks the right mouse button to be quite useful, and wasn’t impressed at all with the dock interface. I sympathize with all these things, honestly. Also, she was somewhat spoiled by the 1600×1200 15″ display, which is pretty easy to understand.

We were back in the Apple Store yesterday though, and between the salesguy showing her Dashboard — I swear she wasn’t that excited when I showed it to her, though this guy did have better hair and glasses — and me convincing her that an MBP was both more computer than she needed and more heat than she wanted, she ended up with a bottom-end MacBook, plus a slight RAM boost. They’re still getting to know each other, but I think it’ll turn out well.

She’s already started complaining to me about blurry/smeared text in Firefox, of course. There’s no winning.

On Monday morning I flew to California for a workshop and a bevy of meetings, as I do on a fair number of Monday mornings lately. While I was in a meeting Monday afternoon, my wife was busy buying us a house. She was ably assisted by our great agent and the inestimably friendly other Mike, but I was tremendously proud that she was able to juggle the large sums of money, competitive bidding strategy, myriad paperwork and general waiting-and-wondering without missing a beat. If ever you have to buy a house while travelling, I highly recommend her services. (That link to mls.ca will probably rot relatively quickly; I’ll have to get Madhava to take some photos of the new place to replace it.)

On Tuesday, she put all that behind her, donned her Super Librarian hat, and taught a few hundred lucky U of T med students about how to properly search, research, and I suppose reresearch, as part of their Determinants of Community Health class. By all accounts — admittedly, relayed through a somewhat giddy Tyla — she did a bang-up job, which of course surprises nobody but possibly her. And all that on what some might consider to be rather short notice.